Telling a story with nine images

- In February of 2017, I found myself standing on the end of an airstrip in a remote part of northern Kenya. It was a hot, warm day and I was actually feeling pretty nervous because on this airplane, I knew was a three month old baby elephant. This was the middle of an elephant rescue, kind of a second stage of a three stage effort here. The elephant had been tranquilized from the ground with a dart, loaded onto this airplane, flown to this airstrip, where it was transferred to a truck.

Here you can see the elephant is still unconscious. They're trying to cool it down by pouring water on it and just making sure that its secure before they start the long drive back to an elephant sanctuary located several miles away. When they got to the sanctuary, they unloaded the elephant from the truck into a stable. This was done just by lifting it up and moving it. There, they gave it a medical exam and then gave it a single injection in its ear. Elephants don't sweat. They cool themselves through their ears, so they had these huge arteries, which you can see here.

What was amazing is that a single injection into the ear woke the elephant up in about 45 seconds. This was the second rescue that I'd seen and this one made me a little more nervous because this elephant was having a hard time waking up. It's an amazing thing, tranquilizing an elephant like this. That they can do this at all is incredible because the vet has to guess the elephant's weight, make an estimate of the dosage, try and hit it sometimes from the air, sometimes from the ground while it's getting more nervous, it's never had any interaction with people before, it's scared.

If he gets the dosage too strong, maybe he kills the elephant. If he doesn't get it strong enough, you've got a panicked, drunk elephant waking up in an airplane. This one took a while. Finally, he staggered to his feet and here, found himself very confused. His mother had been shot and killed. He had been attacked and drugged and now woken up in this place unlike any environment he'd never been in before. He'd never seen people before. If you look closely here on his hind legs, you can see some black spots.

You see more of them on his ears and up on his head. That's the blood from his mother. When she was hit, the blood splattered onto him. That's how close he was standing to her. He'd been through a lot in these few days. As he stood there he tried to make himself very very small. There were five other orphaned elephants staying at this facility and they were let in. Elephants are matriarchal. They're led by a dominant female. In this particular location, there's a three year old elephant named Shaba. The elephants are named after the locations that they're found in. She's become the defacto matriarch.

She came in and immediately smelled this new elephant. She knew that there was a newcomer around. She circled the whole stables until she found his stall and immediately stuck her trunk through and he immediately responded. He came right to her and she began to comfort him. She started petting him, she started touching his mouth, she started gently caressing him. You can see how much blood he has on him here now when you compare him to the clean elephant, Shaba over on the right. She did this for a long time.

Then something very interesting happened. She pulled her trunk back through and she threw a tantrum. She shook her head, she pounded her trunk into this padded wall, she knocked a gate off its hinges. This was the second rescue I'd seen, and this was the exact same behavior she gave the first time. She came in and comforted the elephant, then she threw a fit. The first time I thought, well maybe she's upset because there's an intruder in her territory. Maybe she's upset because her authority's going to be challenged.

The thing is, after she threw the tantrum in both cases, she went right back, reached through, and again, very gently began caressing this new elephant. The thing to know about Shaba, is the same thing happened to her. She watched her mother get shot to death by a poacher, who was after her tusks, and was very traumatized by it. As I watched this play out, both times, it was impossible for me not to look at it and believe that the reason she threw this tantrum is that she's angry.

She's angry that this has happened again. She has recognized what's happened and she doesn't like it. Because she knows what this new baby elephant is going through. They let the rest of the babies in and they immediately came up and started caressing this elephant also and trying to comfort him. Watching this there, you really realize oh this is not a zoo, this is not a refuge. This is an orphanage, just like walking into a human orphanage. These are elephants who have a shared experience.

They have all gone through this same thing, of watching their mother killed. This situation turned a little bit extra sad because this elephant's mother was alive when they found him, but she was so injured there was nothing they could do for the mother, so they had to euthanize her. They took him off somewhere else while they did that. At this point, he doesn't actually know what's happened to his mother, and for the next two or three days, every half hour or 45 minutes, he would wail these horrible, horrible wails as he longed for his mother. The rest of these elephants have been through the same thing.

It was an intense experience. But it was also a hopeful experience, because these elephants are being given a second chance. There's a chance that these elephants are going to be reintroduced to their original herds, back to elephants that they've known before, because this particular sanctuary is being run by the local natives, the local Samburu community, who own, staff, and have organized this entire thing. It's one of the world's first community owned elephant rescue, or large animal rescue and sanctuaries.

It's an amazing achievement and it was great to watch. I'm telling you this story because this is a story that needs to be told. But I'm also telling you this story because while I was there, I was emailing some of these stories home. Heather, my producer here, told me that she took one of these stories, which included five images, and she showed them to her eight year old child and he got it. We were talking and I was reminded that five images can tell a story and that's a great exercise to undertake.

It's a great exercise for a number of reasons. Partly, it's a good editing exercise. We go into these situations and we shoot a lot of things. But what are the images that matter? Less is more in the case of photography, always. To be able to take a situation where you shot a lot of coverage and shot a lot of things and pull out just the images that are key, just the ones that matter, that's a great lesson in editing. That's a great lesson in how to take a string of images and turn them into a cohesive whole. I think there's something else that happens. It makes you understand what makes a good single image.

When you're trying to tell a story in pictures, you're more thoughtful about the images that you're taking. I would put it to you to try this. Try telling a story with just a few images. I did it here with nine images. I think I could have done it with less, but I'm feeling greedy. Maybe take out one of those elephant images and I don't know that I need this last one. I did it before with five. Try five to ten images. See if you can tell a story. What is as story? Well, if you're confused about that, you can start with the simplest definition of story. It's a narrative that has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

A problem, a complication to that problem, and a solution. Another way to think of it is, can you think of three sentences? Can you think of three sentences that tell that story? Elephants are getting shot, tranquilized, and taken to a refuge. There they're being introduced to other elephants that comfort them and have their own reaction to them. There's hope because ultimately these elephants do get reintroduced into the wild. Maybe that's the story and maybe you can find a small set of pictures to tell that story. You may think, "When was the last time I was around elephants that were being rescued?" A good story can be made from anything and that I think is the last, most important reason to tell this story.

Going through this exercise of taking a story of your day and trying to find a series of images that express something about events that were important to you during that day, that not only improves your storytelling ability, your photo ability, but it's going to make you look at your day differently. It's going to make you value certain experiences, maybe a little more deeply. Again, I've put it to you, try and find just some of it in your day. Be something simple, picking up your kids at school, anything at all. See if you can tell that story in as few images as possible. Give yourself up to nine or ten.

See if you can do it in three or five. I think you'll find that it will dramatically change the way you take images, the way you tell stories, and the way you view your own experience.